I know we all love big ugly spiders! I was sitting on the floor in the laundry room painting a stand for my new Evader ducted fan model jet. I stood up and turned to walk down the hallway. I just happened to looked down and realized that I had been getting spied on! (spidered on?) by a good sized man eating spider! OK, it wasn’t the size of a man eater and it didn’t really attack me in a physical sense, just caused a little mental *piff* noise as some brain cells were startled.  The big spider didn’t move all that much and just sort of shifted one way a little bit.  I stepped the other way, quickly,  and went into a kitchen and grabbed a plastic Glad container, then came back and put the relatively thick container over the spider. I say relatively thick because as far as I know, and I’m probably wrong, a spider this size has diamond tough sharp fangs which can penetrate even hardened steel. I didn’t really want to let the giant spider bite me so I was very cautious.

When I covered up the spider it didn’t freak out or panic, it just sort of moved towards the clear plastic wall and poked at it a bit with it’s legs as if it were checking it out, and just settled in as I went off to find a piece of thin plywood to slide under the plastic container and create the perfect spider cage / spider transportation device.  I slid the plywood under the container and Mr. Cool Spider. He just crawled up onto the plywood and sat there presumably not to worried about anything going on.  I then picked up the container and stepped outside with it. When the spider saw the great outdoors he seemed a bit more interested and moved towards the wall of the container and placed a couple of those long legs on the side of the container, looking out and about.

I let my creepy new spider friend acquaintance out by the wood pile, that’s usually where I find big spiders so I thought it might like the cover and bugs provided there as long as some bigger spider didn’t come along and eat him. The spider didn’t move all the much when I put him into the lawn, I think he was in shock, or didn’t want to draw attention to himself or something. I don’t ‘get’ arachnids in general.

About a week later another giant man eating spider found it’s way into the house. This time Bryn whacked it twice with the broom and picked it up with a piece of TP. The thing was just stunned and not dead!  It started to squirm and wiggle and right itself right on top of the toilet paper!  Bryn quickly dumped it in the toilet and the spider climbed to the top of the TP and looked like it was about to spider jump out of the bowl so I slammed the lid and flushed it down. Then I flushed again and ran the tub a bit, I don’t think it’ll be coming back that way. I doubt many spiders are actually reading this but the trick to spider survival is to STAY OUT OF SIGHT lest you be destroyed.

I wish my Scutigera Coleoptrata would eat these things when they were little so I didn’t have to deal with them.  I suspect these are the spiders that leave the creepy looking empty Scutigera shells in the crawlspacement in the spider webs with thick webbing.

I always love to share the horrors of nature with friends and family and the random passer by unfortunate enough to find the spider pages of this site.  I hope you’ve enjoyed the spider pictures. The spider looks pretty cool in this photograph it’s dark body and those big striped spider legs transposed over the leafy and flowery ground cover.

For the record, this isn’t close to the largest spider I’ve seen around here. I think the last home owner must have collected large spiders as a hobby and decided to move after accidentally letting his collection loose on the property! That’s my guess anyways, it could just be that the property is really old and there’s many generations and breeds of spiders here.

This guy also has a great spider story to read if you’re into that kind of stuff!

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Well I woke to quite a surprise this morning!   Mushrooms everywhere in the new lawn.  Bryn had mentioned he mowed a bunch down when he mowed on Saturday but I didn’t think a lot about it.  He didn’t mention that it was like this. Wow! I guess some things get lost in the verbiage

I like to imagine little people moved into my lawn overnight and made little mushroom homes, you can see some of them are clustered like little mushroom palaces, and then just some stand alone mushroom homes here and there. I hope they watch out for the giant man eating spiders which infest the woods nearby and don’t get flooded out when it rains! Perhaps I need to find more exciting hobbies…

I thought this was pretty bizarre that the mushrooms had only grown where we put down the new topsoil to fill in some low spots before we re-seeded the area.  I called the topsoil company and the guy there said that it was pretty common with their soil since they don’t treat the soil with any chemicals.  He said it’s due mostly to all of the moisture and rain we’ve been having lately and once we got a few hot days they’d pop off and die. He said you can mow the mushrooms down and the next day they’ll grow right back.

After doing some reading it seems like there are a few other ways to get rid of mushrooms.  Some favorites are golf clubs, like a pitching wedge.  Go out and get some golfing practice in!  Alternately you can put lime in your soil, adjusting the PH to the proper levels or use chemicals.  Personally they don’t bug me, and are a sign of nutritious soil for plants and lawns and little mushroom people to grow crops in.  It’s only when they start to grow in a ring pattern that you may have a problem.  This is called a Fairy Ring.  Apparently the mushrooms grow on the outer edges of the Fairy Ring, so the circle gets larger and larger.  When the fungus in the ground is this large it can start to steal nutrients from your lawn, instead of help it. No Fairy Ring in my lawn, so I’m doubly okay with it.

When I checked later this afternoon they had all been fried by the sun and not a thing was left standing!

I’m suspecting that these mushrooms will come back overnight again since the humidity is pretty high.  It’s actually pretty cool that they can grow back so quickly!  I’m going to try and get some photos tomorrow morning as well if they’ve come back. The mushrooms are a neat surprise I never expected, I tend to be finding that out a lot with my first experience in home ownership.  Some of the home ownership surprises aren’t really that neat, like the ants, or the giant man eating spiders, and I’m sure other things I’ve yet to find. But yes, it’s a mix of good and bad.  May life bring you all more mushrooms and less ants or spiders!

UPDATE: It’s been a couple of weeks and the weather has turned hotter, though we stil have thundestroms  in the evening.  The shrooms have mostly gone to the great mushroom heaven in the sky and we don’t see much of them. Give nature a chance, folks. Enjoy the mushrooms while they last, cause next week it’ll be a giant man eating spider…

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Me bad hunter, me look hard for big man eating spider,  I no find big spider

I’m alive so you can take that as a clue that I didn’t find the giant spider spider I had seen previously by the barn.  While this is a bit of a relief to me in some ways,  I did actually try to find the the thing for proof and evidence. I tore apart the pile of stuff in front of the barn, with a rake.  It’s perhaps dead and in an unrecognizable lump amongst all the debris, or it beat feat.. lots of feet.. big.. hairy.. spider feet out of town.

Someone told me a spider like this is great against common household pests.. Like what?  Rats, pigeons, cats and dogs?  wow!

Anyways, I’m sorry that I didn’t get any pictures of this thing.  When I saw it yesterday I looked in the front seat of my truck for the camera and realized I had left it in the house.  I’m going to keep it with me more often so I don’t miss anymore rare photo opportunities.

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I just wanted to thank everyone for reading my blog pages. It’s been a lot of fun writing and sharing everything from paver sidewalks, ant murdercide and strange articles from time to time.

Yesterday I was home on defective body leave, again, I went out to my truck to grab some papework, and at that point, the chain reaction which may lead to my eventual death or possibly a severe mental disability occured.  As I looked towards the barn I saw a giant spider.  I don’t mean a big spider, or a huge spider, I mean a GIANT spider.

Now, remember I don’t live in a freaking rainforest, I live in NY between NYC and Albany, it’s pretty moderate here climate and bug wise. In the past when I tell people I’ve seen a big spider, it was perhaps 2-3 inches in diameter and was ‘huge’.   After what I saw yesterday, anything under 5 inches in diameter is ‘big’.

To continue with my story, I looked up towards the barn and sitting on a piece of drywall which was leaned against a door which was leaned against the barns outer wall was this giant spider, at least 5″ in diameter(with legs).  I was 10 feet away and could clearly make out all it’s distinctive features.   It was black, the legs were not tapered to points, but thick and barrel like.  It was very easy to see each leg twitch and move, it had a big round rump, and it was black as night.  I think it saw me look at it because it kind of ‘jumped’.   I closed the truck door and said in astonishment, ‘What the #@%^ are you?’ (sorry mom.. dad.. I was startled!).  It quickly flipped me off and dove down in between the old drywall and door… Very quickly!  My response was just something to the effect of double checking my brain to make sure I had actually just seen that.

I made it back inside and grabbed the half jug of Ortho Home Defense MAX and proceeded to empty about half a gallon of it over this door, against the door, under the door, over the drywall, under the drywall, around the drywall, anything leaning against the wall, for the purpose of killing this bohemouth of a spider. I soaked every opening, crack, crevace, crevice, you name it, it was soaked.  I killed about 100 ants, maybe 20 spiders, some flying insects and a variety of other ‘bugs’ in the process.  I just don’t know if I got the spider….

This brings me to today, this evening.. possibly my last evening.  Tonight I’m going to go home, drink a twisted iced tea, listen to some quiet music and when I am done, I’m going to go out and peel apart the layers of stuff laying against the barn.   It’s quite possibly I will be jumped on and killed by this spider.  Could there be more than one?  Maybe that’s just one of the babies from a recently hatched nest of even bigger spiders!! I don’t know!!  There’s plenty of more theories, perhaps the ants pooled their money and hired some big tough motha to come and get me for killing all their brethern.

But I am doing this for tw-three reasons.

a) My viewers deserve a photo of this giant spider.

b) No one believes it was this big.

c) possible death wish?

I leave the blogs to the remaining ants, by the time they evolve to computer using abilities my adsense will have 29 dollars in it they can use to rule the world.  I leave the 29 1/2 years worth of house payments to any sucker dumb enough to move in with man eating spiders!

On the otherhand, I hope I return from my adventure with pics of a giant spider to make you all go eww, and give me another reason not to sleep at night

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